Falklands focus for Thatcher - The Movie

After the success of The Queen, it was probably inevitable. And yesterday it was announced that Thatcher - The Movie is under way.

Pathé, one of the backers of The Queen, and BBC Films have commissioned a script about the former prime minister which will focus on the 17 days immediately before the Falklands war in 1982.

The script will be by Brian Fillis, who wrote last year's BBC TV biopic about the television cook Fanny Craddock. The producer will be Damian Jones, who produced The History Boys, and who devised the concept with Fillis, according to the showbusiness newspaper Variety.

Before the Falklands war, Mrs Thatcher was deeply unpopular in Britain and it was widely predicted that she would lose the next election. Her image as the Iron Lady was forged by the war and her decision to dispatch the armed forces to the South Atlantic. The film will focus on that period and the characters around her at the time. But who will portray her in what must be a potentially Oscar-winning role?

"I would put my chances of playing her at somewhere between zero and nought," Steve Nallon, the actor and comedian who has probably portrayed her more than anyone else, said last night. "I won't be sitting by my phone. But I think Sharon Osbourne would probably do her very well. The secret is to get the voice right - most people make her talk very slowly - and to forget any liberal lefty leanings you might have and play her with conviction, just as if you were doing Lady Macbeth, who she's a bit like, come to think of it."

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, suggested that Julia Davis, who played Craddock in Fanny, was well equipped for the role, as was Sharon Stone. "And you could have Al Pacino as Galtieri," he added.

Mrs Thatcher has been played most recently by Kika Markham in The Line of Beauty on television. Sylvia Syms portrayed her on stage in 1994 in Half the Picture by Richard Norton-Taylor. Bette Davis is unavailable.

The former prime minister also appeared as herself -somewhat reluctantly - in Tracking Down Maggie, the documentary made about her by Nick Broomfield in 1994.

She has already merited her own stage show, Thatcher - the Musical which has just been touring Britain. Hollywood awaits.